


They Tumble Blindly As They Make Their Way

by spatialvoid



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fem!Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-06
Updated: 2014-11-06
Packaged: 2018-02-24 07:02:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2572445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spatialvoid/pseuds/spatialvoid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Here is something you ought to know about Sherlock Holmes: she didn’t love anyone.  Not her brother, Mycroft.  Not her mother, not her father.</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>  <i>Not even John Watson.  John, her best friend.  </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	They Tumble Blindly As They Make Their Way

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Across the Universe" by The Beatles

Here is something you ought to know about Sherlock Holmes: she didn’t love anyone.  Not her brother, Mycroft.  Not her mother, not her father.

Not even John Watson.  John, her best friend.

For Sherlock, love was imperceptible.  There was caring, and there was great caring, and there was the kind of caring where you would jump off a building if it meant the person in question got to live, but there was not love.

Out of all the many, many, many things that occurred in Sherlock’s brilliant mind, never once did she make the connection that that last kind of caring might be the same thing as love.  Love held itself at a distance from her.  Taunted her in the distance, ran back in forth in front of her as something she would never, could never possess. 

John was good, she always thought.  John was good.  John made her feel like she belonged in a room.   That her intellect was a blessing and not a curse, that the ability to make connections, to hold things in memory like files in a cabinet, was a gift.  It was something that made her feel more _her._  

* * *

For years, they solved mysteries together.   Sorted out conundrums, made right out of wrong.   They were Scotland Yard's favorite private consultants, and they were their best.  There were no problems Sherlock Holmes and John Watson couldn't solve.  

There were so many mysteries, and there was so little time.  They solved them all – the Hound of the Baskervilles, the Sign of the Four, that scandal in Bohemia.

(She does not love Irene Adler.  Irene is cunning, and mysterious, and absolutely _stunning_.  Sherlock is fascinated by her.  She thinks that other than herself, no woman could ever compare to Irene.

But she does not love her. 

She regards her as just another mystery to be solved.) 

Anything and everything involving Moriarty – John was there, watching, waiting, being clever right when she needed him to be.

And Sherlock cared so massively about it that her chest ached sometimes with the joy of it all.  How could so much adventure come to one person? 

How long could it last?

* * *

And then there was the beginning of the end.

* * *

There was a mystery, and then there was Mary, and then there was something else.  It made Sherlock beautifully happy and beautifully sad and so, so angry. 

John, with Mary.  Together.  Without Sherlock. 

John, breaking her heart and she didn’t even know he was.

He was beautiful with Mary, she always thought.  They were so absolutely beautiful.  He always was so fair, so bright, and so was Mary.  They looked like the personification of stars to Sherlock. 

But she missed John.  John was the one constant she needed in her life, and suddenly there was Mary.

He kissed Mary and he flirted with Mary and eventually – eventually he put a ring on her finger and said _I do._

And then he left.  He and Mary had their own house, their own dreams, and their own boring little mediocre human adventures.

Sherlock hated them for it.

And then Sherlock died. 

* * *

Or, rather, she pretended to die. 

She faked her death because she needed to disappear.  She faked her death because Moriarty literally pushed her over the edge and she’d had enough. 

Sherlock Holmes, the world-renowned private detective, was gone.

* * *

Mary dies.  Car accident.  She was pregnant, carrying another person inside her petite frame like a prayer.

Mycroft, ever empathetic, drops it casually into his weekly encrypted e-mail and she breaks in half, crying in the middle of a shop somewhere far from where she fell to her death, gripping her computer as if it were the only thing that could keep her from dying again. 

John.

Oh, John.

This couldn’t happen to John.  He was too good, too right, and too extraordinary for mere human tragedies. 

She takes a deep breath.  Answers Mycroft. 

And decides what’s next.

* * *

Sherlock lives.                       

Sherlock takes a deep breath and comes out of hiding and she finds John.  Oh, she finds John. 

And she is sorry that she ever died in the first place.

* * *

It is hard at first, and empty, and aching.  John is so broken; shattered, even.   

The first days of life after death (for both of them, she thinks, and laughs hollowly) are dark.  The sky is gray and their hearts are gray and she does not know if all these wrongs can ever be righted. 

She does not know if life can ever go on as it did before.

She doesn’t know that she wants it to.

* * *

Over time, they learn so much together.  Sherlock learns how to be human, how to be empathetic.   And John?  John learns how to live after someone you love dies.  John learns how to love again. 

* * *

Life goes on in what feels like slips of paper and faded photographs.  Everything feels like a dream.

One morning, she finds herself holding John Watson’s hand.  And she likes it.  It makes her feel braver, more powerful, more uniquely herself.  John feels like almost (almost) everything he ever asked the world for is standing tall beside him.  Standing encased in five foot eight inches of angled lines and curling hair. 

It still aches.  He wakes, sometimes, dreaming of Mary.  Tossing and turning in the empty bed.  He wakes, thinking, wishing that the universe could have at least let him keep the baby.  If not Mary, God, he prays, couldn’t I have kept the baby?  Mary was almost full term.  He could have lived.

The only thing that keeps him going is Sherlock.  Sherlock doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t pity him.  She sympathizes, yes, but she does not pity him.  She cannot pity him.  She cannot find it in herself to pity him because there is nothing to pity.  She sympathizes, but grief is a foreign emotion to her and she does not want to make it familiar.

* * *

She calls him while he is out one day, buying milk, her voice hushed and excited.

_Let’s move out of London.  Let’s retire.  I've been thinking about this for ages.   Let's buy a farm and go quiet.  Do something lovely and boring like keep bees or have a vegetable garden._  

John, listening.  John, saying _Yes.  Yes.  Okay.  Yes._

Life begins to take shape.  Suddenly they own a farmhouse in the country and Baker Street is a thing of the past.  All their days are quiet days.   

It it is the best thing Sherlock Holmes has ever done.   

And through it all, there is John, standing in the slowly rotting farmhouse, knocking plaster off the walls.  John, making dinner.  John, standing, holding dripping honeycomb, bees swarming around them.  John laughing.  John, making his life and hers real again; not the stuff of storybooks.

John, kissing her.

And Sherlock, realizing.

That third kind of caring?

That was what she felt for John Watson.

And that?

That was love. 

           


End file.
